"The Turret" is a short Cthulhu Mythos story by the late American author Richard A. Lupoff, set in Ramsey Campbell's fictional Severn Valley milieu. It was first published in the Scott David Aniolowski-edited Made in Goatswood by Chaosium in July 1995.
Synopsis[]
An American systems programmer travels to Severnford in England to attempt to fix a computer malfunction for his company's most important client. In between dealing with the surly, degenerate locals and making the acquaintance of a beautiful woman who is a distant relative, he also develops the ability to astrally project his soul. Travelling to a mysterious and sinister tower in the nearby hills, he discovers inhuman beings manipulating a colossal energy-based lifeform. The beings are using the lifeform to tear the very fabric of reality over and over again.
The story concludes with the man vowing to do everything in his power to stop these nefarious activities, but heavily implies that he is wiped from existence due to his exposure to the effects of the experiments.
Characters[]
- Dr. Parker Lorentzen: A computer systems troubleshooter for Myshkin Associates, specializing in the Zeta/Zed system. The story's narrator. He holds "degrees in mathematics, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and computer science." He has a "little blue birthmark near [his] jawline...smaller than a dime, and oddly shaped," resembling either an infinity sign, an hour-glass, or an ankh. It's a common trait among the Parkers, his mother's family.
- Alexander Myshkin: Parker's boss. He assures his employee that the fate of the company is resting on the success of his mission.
- Dr. Karolina Parker: Parker's "opposite number" at the Karl Fuchs Institute,[1] which is having trouble with the Zeta/Zed system. She turns out to be a distant cousin of Parker, and shares his birthmark. He finds her to be "a delightful young woman"; she's "perhaps a few years younger" than Parker, but has a "marked...family resemblance" to him. She has the same birthmark as him.
- Nelson MacIvar: Chief engineer of the Fuchs Institute. He's a "burly individual...with a thick head of bushy red hair, a tangled beard of the same color, save that it was going to gray, and a complexion to match."
Publication History[]
- Made in Goatswood (1995)
- Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture (1998)
- Claremont Tales II (2002)
- Terrors (2005)
- The Doom That Came to Dunwich (2017)
Behind the Mythos[]
Although containing several plot seeds -- the unusual relationship developing with the man’s distant cousin and her place in the scheme of things, the source of the computer system's malfunctions, the man’s spontaneous ability to astrally project, the nature of the beings -- "The Turret" fails to follow through on any except the activities going on in the strange turret. As such, it reads more like the beginning of an unfinished novel than a complete short story.
References[]
- ↑ Karl Fuchs was a German physicist in exile who worked on the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb for the United States, while at the same time spying for the Soviet Union, greatly hastening its development of the hydrogen bomb. See Atomic Heritage Foundation, "Karl Fuchs,"